That game where the challenge is to name 10 famous Canadians makes more sense in Norway, where 10 is a much larger proportion of the population. On a bracing, sunny day in April, the Oslovians were out in force – which meant there was practically nobody on the streets.

Given that we travellers want to feel we are charting virgin territory that nevertheless comes with good hotels, accessible cultural institutions and English translations of everything, Oslo is really on to something. Even the room in the city’s National Gallery that houses Edvard Munch’s 'The Scream' was nearly empty. Yet this strange, skull-like figure, distraught beneath a lurid sky, is one of the world’s best-known paintings. True, there are four versions of it – one sold at Sotheby’s New York earlier this month for £74 million, while Oslo’s Munch Museum owns the other two; and true, the Munch Museum is a bit out of the way. But it is worth visiting for its bijou permanent collection plus the kind of outlandishly interesting temporary exhibitions you are likely to come up with if you are limited to one, admittedly prolific, artist (I saw his rubbings. Who knew rubbings could be art? But they can).

When he painted 'The Scream', Munch was probably about four miles (6km) south of Oslo, up a hill in Ekeberg, gazing down at his city on the lip of the fjord. And like Ekeberg, the National Gallery offers something the Munch Museum can’t: perspective. There are international as well as national artists here, which is useful given that Norway’s talents had a tendency to quit the motherland, grumbling about inadequate appreciation. Henrik Ibsen wrote most of his greatest plays in Italy and Germany (Freud apparently learnt Norwegian in order to read them) Munch, too, flitted to western Europe at every opportunity in his youth. In a sense, these 19th‑century artists were a modern equivalent of those earlier footloose Norwegians, the Vikings, continually running off to influence (and be influenced by) their neighbours – if a little less forcefully in the case of these artists.

The Vikings have gone but the boats remain, and those who lack their own can take the ferry out to the islands and beaches dotting the jagged coastline. The warriors weakened, and Norwegians became vassals of one neighbour or another for most of the past 500 years, which must have complicated their relationship with the sea. Insularity would have been hard to come by, and it is one of the cleverest achievements of their new Opera House that it reflects that.

In this elegant iceberg of a building, I saw a modern-dance rendition of The Ice Palace, a children’s story that everyone here knows but no foreigner would. Then I walked up the sloping marble roof and stood atop the performance space looking out at the fjord. Land and water, patriotic pride and curiosity about the world: Oslo seemed to me, right then, a place of perfect balance.

Yet the Scandinavians, for all their wealth and welfare, do not exactly have a reputation for balance; quite the opposite. Munch nearly drank himself to death, self-medicating his nervous disposition; it took a break-up and a breakdown to make him quit (he then lived until he was 80). It is possible that the balance between dark and light is easier to achieve in a country than in an individual: those long, winter nights give rise to doomy individuals whose works have all the brightness their temperament lacks. Sweden’s posterboy for this personality dysfunction is August Strindberg, who knew both Munch and Ibsen (he socialised with the former but called the latter a “decrepit old troll” for supposedly basing the flashy academic in Hedda Gabler on him); Norway’s is Munch, although there’s stiff competition.

These are good things to contemplate standing in the National, comparing angst-ridden Munchs with the extraordinary luminous landscapes of Harald Sohlberg, who counts as number three famous Norwegian (they are not in order of importance), or wandering around just outside the gallery. This patch at the top of Karl Johans Gate is a neoclassical hub, thanks to the eponymous, architecture-loving 19th-century king of Sweden and Norway – a union dissolved in 1905, to the relief of the Norwegians, who had already spent 400 years under Danish rule.

A few steps from Karl Johan’s Royal Palace is the National Theatre, where Ibsen made his name. The programme is still fiercely impressive: Liv Ullmann, a very famous Norwegian – if mainly for her films with Ingmar Bergman, another Swede – won raves for Long Day’s Journey Into Night here in 2010. The nearby Hotel Continental has 12 original Munch prints in its bar, while across the broad boulevard, the Grand Hotel boasts a somewhat fantastic 19th-century frieze celebrating the city’s artistic life.

Ibsen, who lurks on one side, away from all the young upstarts, used to walk to this hotel every day for a pre-prandial drink from his house up the road (now a sweet little museum), then march home for lunch.

Ibsen and Munch are certainly the easiest famous Norwegians to find in Oslo (with one extraordinary exception. But I’ll get to him). Still, Roald Amundsen Gate – named for the Norwegian polar explorer – takes you from the theatre to City Hall, where boats depart for the surrounding islands. Facing the fjord, with its inimitable light, I had the medieval Akershus Castle on my left, the Opera House just beyond; to the right were the trendy cafés of Aker Brygge, where Oslovians on day-release from the hip Grünerløkka quarter can make like their ancestors and gaze out to sea, with decaf lattes to enhance the experience.

Those who left, warrior or writer, often came home in old age. Munch and Ibsen are both buried in the Var Frelsers cemetery just up the picturesque hill called Telthusbakken, which has dinky little houses on one side and allotments on the other; it has barely changed since Munch painted it. Also in the cemetery lie homebodies, such as the composer Edvard Grieg.

I searched for Knut Hamsun, the controversial, Nobel Prize-winning author of Hunger, in which he describes Oslo (then called Christiania) as “that strange city no one escapes from until it has left its mark on him” and, apparently, the only man who could out-talk Hitler (after the war, his reputation faltered owing to his Nazi sympathies), but he is buried in the garden of his home down the coast, in the wonderfully named Grimstad.

Oslo is good at writers, not all of them dead: Jostein Gaarder, author of Sophie’s World, and Jo Nesbø both live here, but are relatively invisible, which is not an accusation that can be levelled at my final nominee, Gustav Vigeland, another Munch contemporary, whose extraordinary sculptures rear out of Vigeland Park north of Aker Brygge. They are not always beautiful, these roiling figures bereft of clothes, but they are startling, accessible, and decidedly worth seeing. Much like their city, in fact.

Spring is lovely; summer has lots of cultural events, including Oslo Culture Night (September 14), National Music Day (the first Saturday in June) and the Norwegian Wood Rock Festival (June 14-17; Tom Petty headlines on June 15).

Further information

The Official City App is free from Visit Oslo (visitoslo.com); Visit Norway (visitnorway.co.uk) has lots of practical information; Nordic Nibbler (nordicnibbler.com) is a knowledgeable and passionate food blogger.

The inside track

You can see The Scream at the National Gallery (Kristian Augusts Gate 23; 0047 2198 2000; nasjonalmuseet.no) and the Munch Museum (Tøyengata 53; 2349 3500; munch.museum.no). Closer to home, Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye, featuring some 60 paintings and 50 photographs, is at Tate Modern from June 28-October 14; Edvard Munch: Graphic Works from The Gundersen Collection is at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art until September 23.

An Oslo Pass, valid for 24, 48 or 72 hours, is an excellent way to save time, money and hassle; it gives you access to more than 30 museums as well as all public transport and ferries to nearby islands, plus informantion on parking in municipal car parks, entry to outdoor swimming pools and discounts on various other tourist activities. Prices start at £30 for 24 hours and the pass can be purchased from tourist information centres, hotels and the Visit Oslo website (visitoslo.com).

The best views are either from the top of the Oslo Opera House (Kirsten Flagstads Plass 1, 2142 2121; operaen.no) or from the hillside Ekeberg Restaurant (Kongsveien 15; 2324 2300; ekebergrestauranten.com), which is easily accessible by tram. The view from below Lars Backer’s lovely Functionalist building is supposedly the one in The Scream, but even if it isn’t (Munch’s recollections weren’t terribly reliable), the view over Oslo and its harbour is lovely.

The Gamle Aker Church at the top of Telthusbakken is a more imposing relic of Old Oslo than, say, the ruins behind the Opera House and a more scenic one too. It was built in around 1100 and painted by Munch; it’s still a working church but also holds concerts.

The best hotels

Hotel Folketeateret ££

In an arcade that houses Oslo’s more populist theatre, five minutes’ walk from the railway station. Stylish, niftily space-conscious rooms, fabulous buffet breakfast and a residents’ lounge where afternoon cakes and an evening meal are included in the rate (0047 2200 5700; clarionhotel.com; doubles from £200, including light evening meal).

Grims Grenka Hotel ££

Smart, exceptionally central hotel near Akershus, the medieval fort that King Christian IV shifted the city towards after most of it burned down in 1624. It has a raw food restaurant and a rooftop bar with lovely views (8001 0410; firsthotels.com; doubles £125).

Grand Hotel £££

Right where the action is, on Oslo’s Champs- Elysées, Karl Johans Gate; the temporary home of Nobel Peace Prize laureates when the prize-giving ceremony comes around, with a central balcony from which they, like newly-wed British royals, come out to wave (2321 2000; grand.no; doubles from £230).

The best restaurants

Bar Boca £

If you want food, go to the diner across the road but for a coffee or a cocktail (they even stock London’s Sipsmith Gin), squeeze into this tiny, retro bar – Oslo’s smallest, apparently – in trendy Grünerløkka. My bartender was a cheery woman in a dotted headscarf; she looked like a chic version of a Fifties housewife, but she didn’t mix drinks like one (Thorvald Meyers Gate 30; 2204 1377).

Delicatessen ££

Oslovians are rather keen on tapas and this cheery, unpretentious restaurant on the Akerselva river does them well – lots of fresh fish, crunchy beans and gooey croquetas, as well as an Enomatic machine, which enables open wine bottles to stay fresh longer (Søndre Gate 8; 2271 4546; delicatessen.no).